


Seal of Love

by Endangered_Slug



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, May Day Menagerie, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 11:08:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7046998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Endangered_Slug/pseuds/Endangered_Slug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Mantis May Day Menagerie pinch hit for we-aim-to-misbehave. Selkie!Rum, Maiden!Belle. An unwanted marriage, a seduction, and sexy times ahoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seal of Love

**Author's Note:**

> I was asked to pinch hit when the original zookeeper didn't work out.

Belle ran.

The raucous sounds of the village faded behind her as she stumbled her way to the shore. They were celebrating her betrothal. A mockery of festivities that bound her to the last man she wanted to marry. Gaston was the son of the village headman and wielded more power than anyone had a right to when all he thought of was himself. He mouthed the right words, speaking of devotion and love, but his eyes promised a painful existence of isolation and the burden of bearing his children until she was dried up. A useless husk of herself, old before her time like so many other women of her village.

When the headman bound their hands together as a symbol of their coming union, it was as if a stone lodged in her throat. Gaston held his arm aloft triumphantly, barely heeding the fact that he was heads taller than Belle leaving her to struggle on her tiptoes to keep from dangling from his arm like the carcass of some poor creature he’d just brought back from a brutal hunt.

While she was unable to protest the union, for she had no voice in the matter, she did have legs and she fled the revelry after having plied her intended with drink after drink after drink of bitter meade until he passed out, his grubby hands pawing at her all the while in a clumsy effort to “try out the goods”.  She stood over him, her breath held against the stench of body sweat and fetid alcohol and toed at his ribs with her boot — perhaps a little too rough to be considered a nudge — until she was sure he was fast asleep in a stupor that would last until the sun was high and his head was a painful reminder of the excesses of the night before.

She hoped his brain liquefied because of it. It’s not as if he was using it anyway.

The moonlight filtered through the thick canopy of branches, giving her just enough light to keep to the path. The water wasn’t forbidden, but venturing into it was frowned upon, especially for unmarried females on the cusp of womanhood. Go in groups, don’t go out too far and stay close to the shore, watch out for strange creatures who would steal you away.

Belle thought it was all rot. She’d been a woman for years now according to her own definition of the term, but the only strange creatures she had seen had walked about on two legs and lived in her village.

There were seals that came to the cove and those might be considered strange, but Belle had always liked them. Their loud, harsh barking comforted her somehow when the breeze carried the sound as far as her village, tucked away in the hill side. They played on the far side of the cove, but sometimes they would venture over to the shore when there were no men present with their heavy spears and penchant for killing every animal within sight.

Every so often a hunter will bring one back in a kill, the pelt freshly skinned and smelling of putrid death and then the seals would stay away for months. The pelts were prized among the village because they were thick and the fur was soft and warm and it was tradition for a man to bring one back for his bride as a symbol of his love. Not everyone was able to get one, for the seals were crafty and had become wary of men, but every man tried. Belle cried whenever a hunter came crawling up from the sea with a dripping gray skin slung over his shoulder. She felt no sense of triumph or gallantry from the act, only sorrow and remorse.

There was only one seal left in their cove. The others were either killed or had learned to stay away and a man had to travel far in order to find any for their betrothed. The lone seal had stayed though, despite the threat to its life. Belle didn’t know much about seals other than they were graceful in the water and rather comical on land. A bit smelly, a bit loud, but harmless for the most part and deserving of a better fate than to be used as a bloody token of love.

She’d come across the seal often during her trips to the cove, the first being when she’d found him ensnared in a cruel trap, his flipper caught in a tangle of wire that had ripped through the skin. The seal had managed to swim to the human side of the cove and beached itself, either looking for someone to help him or as a place to let go and die. Belle refused to let him suffer and untangled the wire, cutting own fingers in the process as she wept over his wounds until he was able to break free from the cruel snare and slip back into the water with a splash.

She wondered how he managed to get caught in it for the snare was the type a hunter would use for a rabbit, deep in the woods. Still, asking him wouldn’t do her any good. Seals couldn’t talk though, at least not in a language she understood so she was left with a mystery to unravel.

He watched her after that horrible night. Warily, as if he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t club him about the head, but, eventually, he grew to trust her enough to sun himself on the outcropping of rocks in the middle of the cove. Sometimes on warm evenings when she’d escaped the village for an hour, he would swim up to the beach and flop closer, almost near enough to touch if she stretched her arms out. His fur was soft and wet underneath her fingers and it shone in the light while his soft brown eyes watched her, trusting that she would never strike him.

The wounds healed on his flipper, but it was never the same afterwards. The scars ran deep and but the disfigurement didn’t slow him down much. Belle waited for him to join his colony — wherever they had swam off to and sometimes he disappeared for weeks, but still he came back to sit by Belle’s side and take comfort in her presence. Sometimes he brought her a fish which he ate from her fingers, gently and cautious as if he knew that the wrong move and he’d snap her fingers off with his large and sharp teeth.

Even without this experience Belle felt killing the seals was a waste of a life. They weren’t used for food, their yellow fat wasn’t harvested for their lamps, their pelts weren’t turned into boots or gloves or anything useful. They were killed for the sake of being killed and Belle would not condone the slaughter of these gentle creatures despite tradition. Nor would she smile bravely when Gaston dropped one at her feet as she knew he intended to do. It was more a matter of pride for him than one of devotion and love. He would start his hunt the next morning if he woke up in time. If he didn’t recover before the sun rose, then there was another day respite for the seal. She had to make her escape, and his, by then.

The path widened now, and the sharp, dried-out pine needles were gradually being replaced by the soft, white sand of the beach. The moonlight was stronger now that the the trees had thinned out and the salty air thicker, too, tangy and pungent as it assaulted her nose. She breathed deeply as she rounded past a small grass-covered dune and there it was, the glittering water spread out before her, glittering like the morning dew on a spider’s web.  

The cove stretched from tip to tip, curving like the tip of a cat’s tail onto itself with a narrow inlet that led out to sea. The far side of the cove was protected by a large rockfall that jutted out into the cove like a long finger pointing the way to the open water. Another rockfall, decades old, had sheared off on the village side making it nearly impossible to climb over. The only way to the seals was to swim or go the long way back through the forest. Belle was an adequate swimmer, but the current in the middle was deceptive and swift, liable to snatch you away and drag you out to sea if you weren’t careful. The easiest way to go would be to swim out to the tip of the jetty, climb over it, and swim the rest of the way. Once on the other side, she would follow the coast until she reached a port, hopefully drawing the seal away from the cove along with her. With any luck he’d stay away, safe from Gaston’s knife.

It was not the best plan, but it was the only one she could think of while she waited for Gaston to pass out.

She stood at the edge of the water, letting it lap at her boots, watching for any movement across the way, but shore was empty. The seal must have moved on for the time being. Relieved that he was safe, at least for now, Belle sat down in the wet sand and began to undo the laces on her bodice. It was quick work to remove her clothes and tie them up in a big bundle and the bundle to her leg to keep it from floating away. She didn’t relish the idea of traveling naked, but she would if she had to.

She gasped in shock as the first lick of freezing water touched her toes, but she bravely forged ahead, bracing herself against the cold as it she rushed against the surge of waves that kept pushing her back towards the beach. The swim to the outcropping was brutal and more than once Belle thought of letting the water take her rather than force her stiff arms to move another inch, but, just as she thought she wasn’t going to make it, her fingers touched the hard, slippery surface of the jetty’s tip, trying to avoid the sharp barnacles that ripped at her flesh. She clung to the rock, letting her body float with the push and pull of the waves until she had recovered enough to go on.

The water was calmer on the other side and for that Belle was grateful. Her muscles felt ready to seize and they shook as she dragged herself up the beach once her feet touched sand, too exhausted to stand.

Gasping, she flipped over onto her back and stared unbelieving at the stars, feeling let down that they looked exactly the same as they had on the other side of the cove. Silly thought, but she felt changed, exhilarated in her daring. She’d left the village. No one had ever done that. Not in recent memory. Her audacity should have been written in the stars themselves.

The breeze was chilly against her wet skin and there was no time to warm up, not if she wanted to be gone by daybreak. Sitting up, she fumbled with the ties to the bundle of clothes. She’d have to put them on wet. Not ideal, but neither was the alternative.

She squatted in the water to rinse the sand off her arms, looking around for her seal. He was nowhere to be found. She worried about leaving. He was going to come back and sooner or later someone would happen to him. She wasn’t the only maiden in the village and he was the last seal…

Keeping her eyes peeled on the outcropping for any signs of human or aquatic life, she scrubbed off the last of the sand, then reached behind her for her bundle of clothes, but, instead of a mass of wet cotton, her hand fell on a soft pile of fur.

“No!” she cried out, scrambling back on her hands and knees towards the carefully folded pelt, her heart plummeting in shock.  “No!”

Her hands trembling, she picked it up and shook it out and cried once more when the head flopped forward. Its eyes were gone, but the muzzle had the same softly graying spread of age that her seal had. She pulled it up into her lap into a big pile to check the flipper and wailed when she saw the mangled scar along the toes.

It was her seal.

Someone had gotten to him already. But who? Certainly not Gaston, he would never leave such a prize lying around when he could parade it in front of his brainless admirers. No, someone did this in secret and hoped to surprise his bride with it before the proposal was even made. She gathered it up into her arms, forgetting her clothes, forgetting that she was leaving, forgetting everything except her seal and his cruel death and sobbed into the pelt, pressing her face into the soft, brown fur until her ribs ached.

The tears eventually dried up giving way to a burning anger that welled up and settled into her chest like a furnace, so it was rather unfortunate for the man who just then came stumbling out of the forest with a hoarse cry. He came at her, limping unevenly and skidded to his knees in front of her with his arms outstretched.

“My skin!” he said, snatching at it. His eyes were a deep brown in the moonlight and wide with frantic worry, but Belle wasn’t having any of it.

“How! Could you!” she cried, yanking the skin back from him, but his grip was too tight, his strength too great to pull it from his grasp and all she managed was to pull him on top of her.

Her breath whooshed out of her lungs as he landed heavily on top of her and she slapped at him, using her knees and feet to keep him away, but he was stronger than he looked and just as determined as she was to take the pelt.

“No, it’s mine!” he cried in a strange accent, frantically, his hair whipping about his face as he tugged at it.

They grappled, rolling in the sand as they fought over the pelt. She pounded at his face and tried to catch his flesh with her teeth, but he was slippery and deflected her blows as best he could. His concentration was all on the skin, but he never raised a finger to her, merely absorbing the blows and grunting in pain when she landed a particularly good one.

Finally she managed to break away, lifting her leg and kicking at his chest. “It’s not! It’s his! You can’t have it!” she gasped, clutching it to her chest as she struggled to catch her breath.

He fell on his back with a loud “oof” and, for the first time, Belle noticed that he was naked. As was she, still.

“I won’t let you steal this,” she told him, her voice trembling with a righteous fury. She wrapped the skin around her neck like a shawl and scrambled after her own clothes.

“I’m not stealing anything,” he said, pulling himself up on one wiry arm and rubbing at his chest with the other. “It’s mine. It was always mine.” His voice was low and raspy, coming out of his mouth as if speech was difficult for him.

Belle didn’t stop. She yanked her shift over her head, but the wet sleeves stuck to themselves and she fumbled around trying to work her arms through. “You lie,” she spat out, dancing out of his way as he grabbed for her ankles. “I knew this seal and you murdered him.” At last, she got one arm through, but her damp hair was tangled up with it, jerking her head to the side. “Ow.”

“Belle,” the stranger said softly, his hand outstretched and grasping at the sand with white-knuckled fingers. “Please.”

She stopped, forgetting the sleeve, the pelt, her nakedness and turned to him slowly, with her heart hammering in her chest. “How do you know my name?”

He said nothing, but he was panting now, his eyes pleading with her.

“How do you know my name?” she asked again, taking a step back. She was truly frightened now. Her village wasn’t large and she knew everyone in it. This man, this stranger, this murderer shouldn’t know her name and the feeling that she was in dangerous territory crept over her in sickening waves.

“That’s my skin,” he said as he sat up, letting his knees fall to the sides. He sat immodestly as if being naked meant nothing to him and Belle would have blushed if she wasn’t so angry and scared.

Her eyes glanced down, then away, then back at his legs and the truth began to tickle at the front of her brain like a sneeze that wanted to come, but couldn’t.

“Your foot,” she began, then clamped her mouth shut as the pieces clicked together. His foot was a misshapen lump of scar tissue that looked utterly painful to walk on. A part of her recognized it, but the rational side of her dismissed the idea as preposterous, a seal could not turn into a man, it wasn’t possible.

“Your foot is hurt,” she said, weakly. She slipped the pelt from her shoulders, pulling it out from under her chemise.

“Not your fault,” he muttered, his eyes rapidly jumping from her face to the skin in her hands.

She stroked the pelt and watched as he stiffened with a small gasp before a shudder overtook him. He stared at her then, open mouthed and speechless.

She reached down and found the flipper, the damaged one and held it up in the moonlight, but she knew it already. She had cried over it and soothed it with balms and would recognize that scaring anywhere. She looked at his foot, again, the scars running in thick ropes where something, say a wire, might have bitten through his skin. They matched perfectly. The truth washed over her in a tidal wave of astonishment and relief that left her breathless with wonder.

“This is yours,” she breathed. “Yours that you… grew? You didn’t kill anything for it.”

“It’s mine,” he reassured her.

“But…”

“It’s mine,” he repeated, and stood up on shaky legs. He took a hesitant step or two towards her, stopping just short of arm’s reach. “Can I have it back?”

She stroked the pelt again, marveling at its softness and the gray dapples in its brown fur. It was such an odd color for a seal and she wondered why she never noticed before. But how could she suspect that he could turn human? The idea would never have crossed her mind.

“You were always... this?” she asked, looking up at him through her lashes.

He made a face, the face of a man who had never had to explain things before and was searching for the right words that danced out of his grasp. “I’m both,” he said simply. “Selkie.”

“Your name is Selkie?”

He laughed, a loud bark that made her jump. “No. Selkie is who I am. My name is… Well, I don’t know how to say it in this tongue.”

“Try?”

Another bark, softer this time with a rolling, rumbling sound that she could feel all the way down to her knees.

“Rrrrumbole?” she said, trying to wrap her mouth around the strange sounds. It would be impossible to replicate his name with her smaller jaw and muscles. She could only do her best and hope that she wasn’t saying something rude by mistake. “Rrrumple? Rumple.”

He smiled and breathed a soft laugh. “Close enough.”

His eyes were soft and warm and he looked at her as if she were a miracle. His long hair was the same brown as his pelt and shot through with gray, hanging over his eyes and his shoulders. His face was careworn and his nose was long and crooked, hanging over a thin mouth that housed sharp, crooked teeth.

“May I?” he asked, holding out his hand.

Startled, Belle handed the pelt to him, letting her fingers brush over it as he took it from her.

“I’m sorry I kicked you,” she said, sheepishly.

He looked up, surprised. “Don’t be. You’re fierce and caring. I didn’t expect anyone to find it or else I would have hidden it. But out of anyone in the world to find it, I’m glad it was you. You’re the only one I could trust with it for you’ve proven your loyalty many times.”

“I, uh, I don’t like to see anything suffer. I never agreed with the village’s pelt hunting. That’s why I’m here actually.”

“You came for my pelt?” he asked, his face screwing up in confusion.

“I came to save it,” she corrected. “I was betrothed tonight and in the morning Gaston will be on the lookout for you.

His shoulders slumped and he took a step back, breathing heavily. “You were betrothed?”

“Not willingly, but yes, I was promised. To the worst of all of them.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out over the cove towards the path that led to her village. “I made my escape, but I couldn’t leave without warning you.”

“How did you plan on doing that?”

She turned her head and looked at him, a tentative smile on her face. “I have no idea,” she said with a small laugh. “I thought to lure you up the coast, hoping you’d follow me until we reached safety, but I don’t know where that is or even if it exists. I just knew that I couldn’t let Gaston — I couldn’t let him steal your pelt. It’s wrong.”

“Did you suspect I was a selkie?”

“No. No. But wrong is wrong is it not?”

He nodded his head, then, looking for something to do, turned toward his skin and shook it out. It reached to the ground and

“I didn’t hurt it,” Belle said, defensively.

He glanced at her. “Of course not. I’m just straightening it out a bit. Sometimes it’s easier to do this when I have thumbs,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

“Ah.”

She watched as he smoothed the fur that was rumpled during their fight, his large hands and fingers stroking over the pelt with loving care. She squatted down on the opposite side, eager to help, but when she stroked a small, bedraggled section he sucked in a shuddering breath and dropped the pelt, staring at her with hungry eyes.

“I’m never going to see you again am I?”

She blinked, her hands hovering over the skin unsure if she should touch it again. “I don’t know. I’m not coming back and I don’t think you should either.”

His eyes shone with dampness. “I’ve never wanted to be any place else,” he said slowly, searching for words he couldn’t explain.

“It’s not safe for you here,” she protested. “It never was. You were already hurt once and I’m not the only maiden in the village.”

He squeezed his eyes closed, frowning. “I don’t like the idea of not seeing you again.”

Belle reached out to touch his hair. It was just as soft as his fur and she stroked it back away from his face. His eyes flew open at her touch, his lips parting as his breath came out in soft gasps that ghosted over her face.

“Belle?”

“I was going to take you with me anyway,” she whispered, then gasped as he leaned over to capture her lips with his.

Belle was aware that she was still damp from her swim and sandy from her fight with Rumple and that she was naked underneath her chemise, which was only half on, but she didn’t feel the need to cover herself. It felt as natural to be naked around him as it did to be clothed, but nothing felt as natural as it did to press her body against his and kiss him until her breath was stolen completely.

“How long can you stay like this,” she panted when they broke away.

“Indefinitely,” he said. “But I’ll always want to go back,” he said, leaning back to look into her eyes, mournfully.

“I’d never ask you to give up the sea,” she said. “It’s a part of who you are.”

“It could be a part of you?” he said, stroking her face with his fingertips. “You could join me. In the sea,” he clarified. “I could show you… coral reefs and underground caverns and we could go anywhere you wanted. _Anywhere_. We don’t have to be stuck in this cove unless we wanted to be.”

She blinked, mouth dropping. “How does that work.”

He blushed, but his eyes never wavered from hers. “If I took a mate…”

“If?”

“The choice would be yours.”

A choice to say yes or no. To see the world — both worlds, for there was much under the sea to explore as well as the land… It had never been granted to her before and she felt heady with the power it gave her.

“We already share a bond,” he told her, motioning toward his flipper. “When you took that snare off me, you cut yourself and our blood mixed together.”

“Are you telling me I could have popped into a seal at any time?” she laughed. It would have made her swim a lot easier if she’d known that.”

He chuckled along with her, shaking his head. “No, that wouldn’t have happened. A mating bond would finish the process.”

“Is that why you stayed? Even after the others had left?”

He nodded again, touching his forehead with hers. “Yes. I’d wished for you for a very long time.”

The idea of a mating bond wasn’t foreign. It was just another way of tying herself to another being, but Rumple, this sweet, gentle creature, was nothing like Gaston. She felt no fear when she was with him, no need to hide herself or pretend she was something she wasn’t. And he offered her something no one else had before: her freedom. She could learn to love a man like that. She was half in love with him already. Why not take the next step?

She turned her head and kissed his earlobe, whispering, “Yes, Rumple. I’ll go with you.”

His shoulders shook with unshed tears and he hid his face in her hair as he breathed a quiet, “thank you.” She rubbed her hands along his shoulders until he leaned back to look at her with shining eyes, bright with tears and a contagious smile on his face. She beamed back at him, laughing as he barked out joyously, then squealed as he tackled her to the ground, grasping and kissing as she worked her shirt back over her head. She flung it away, careless of where it landed, for who needed clothes when they had better things to do?

He laid her out on top of his pelt and touched her with questing fingers, finding the spots that made her gasp and cry out, his mouth following his hands until she was a boneless mass begging for him to take her.

Their coupling was unhurried and gentle and nothing could have prepared Belle for the sensation of having Rumple move inside her, his harsh barking cries encouraging her own breathless moans as they moved towards a completion that welled up in shooting sparks from the place where they were joined, spreading out in a white-hot fire that burned everything it touched and she was begging once more for it to come. She screamed when the break finally came, her muscles clenching him tightly as it came again and again in waves that washed over her until her pleasure had nearly became pain. Rumple’s came a moment after, his hips stuttering with his own orgasm before he collapsed on top of her, rolling them over until she was on top and he pulled the pelt over them.  

Belle woke up to the first rays of the sun rising and the sound of Rumple’s voice whispering things into her hair. She lifted her head out from under the pelt and looked at him through her own hair, now hopeless after her swim and their grappling fight and their mating.

He pulled his skin on and before her eyes he became her seal once more, staring up at her with worried eyes before he looked at the water. He lumbered towards it and splashed in, diving under before popping back out in a burst of spray that caught her by surprise, barking at her as if to say, “hurry it up.”

“You’re sure this will work?” she asked, stepping back into the water, now a bit warmer than it had been hours earlier, but the temperature didn’t bother her anymore.

He swam a little further away, drawing her out, laughing, she went after him, her feet splashing as she ran until she was in up to her thighs and she dove in head first.

The change was instant and painless and she sped towards her mate, bumping him with her nose when she failed to pull up in time and he nuzzled her. They twirled together joyfully, bumping and nudging each other until their exhilaration had run its course and, as the sun rose over the horizon, Rumple led Belle out of the cove forever.


End file.
